IT IS not every week that the BBC launches a comedy-drama featuring a character billed as an Army private with “an encyclopaedic knowledge of filth”.

This is just how Mac, played by Taggart’s Jamie Quinn, is described in BBC3’s Bluestone 42 about a bomb disposal unit in Afghanistan.

Yet as Army comedies go this is as far as you can get from the Seventies’ It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum. In this comedy Mac has an incredibly potty mouth and would have been driven from that Seventies concert party comedy for swearing like a trooper.

You will, however, have to take my word about the “filth”, as none of it is fit to publish here.

At a launch in London last week I was assured the dialogue was all “in context” and that the BBC would broadcast the show well after the watershed, with an audience warning at the start.

However, watch most American sitcoms and the last thing you will ever hear is bad language. There was certainly none of it in the outstanding US medical comedy M*A*S*H, with which Bluestone 42 has been compared. Why here then?

The answer is that it is all in the “interest of authenticity” and for appealing to BBC3’s “16-34 demographic”, an age group which the station has been steadily stealing from Channel 4.

The banter is recognisable. Squaddies swear, that’s it, really

Jamie Quinn

The comedy-drama, arguably more comedy than drama with a co-writer from Miranda, has been filmed entirely in South Africa so it can look “something” like the Green Zone in Afghanistan, called “green” because you do see vegetation here rather than desert.

Much effort and licence fee payers’ cash has gone towards making the show as “truthful” as possible. Insiders say the series could have cost upwards of £2million. In one scene a real rocket launcher was used.

“We wanted to make it look right and to look truthful. That was the focus of the whole thing, not just firing off the guns,” says actor Jamie Quinn, who plays Mac.

Scott Hoatson, who plays his dim mate Rocket, says a stuntman and a historical adviser were on hand to “choreograph” the explosions. “It was incredible to watch, from a long way away. We were hundreds of metres from the blast and had earplugs and stuff. It was great to see!”

Quinn is quick to defend the foul language: “This is just how these people speak. The banter is recognisable. Squaddies swear, that’s it, really.”

WOULD the foul language not put off parents and grandparents? “In any show there are a certain number of ‘C’ words that you can use,” he says.

Hoatson agrees the language is in context: “I hope people aren’t put off. It comes from that place of trying to make it authentic and the language is part of the authenticity.”

Says Quinn: “I know people who speak like that. I cuss myself and I am sure other people do too. If we were to water the language down we would be lying to ourselves and the audience to pretend that these guys don’t speak like this.”

Away from the language the main plot in the first episode centres on the arrival of a female padre (Kelly Adams from Hustle) at the unit, only for her to be prey to the sex-starved attentions of the detachment, not least salivating Captain Nick Medhurst. It is enough to make fans of Men Behaving Badly blush.

Says Adams: “I was asking the female padre whom I met if the men and women are separated on base but she said they are all together. She also said, ‘Things do go down. It’s like a big soap’.

“People do fall in love and people do fancy each other. All that goes on. It’s great. I thought it was a cracking part.”

The actors were determined to get the tone right says Quinn: “From the get-go we were assured by producers that they were going to treat the subject as honestly as possible so we were in safe hands, getting a balance between comedy and drama.”

Could the series prove to be a recruiting sergeant for the Army? Says Quinn: “The last thing we want to do is glamorise anything. That was very clear.

Taggart's Jamie Quinn plays Mac in the new comedy-drama

“This is not about ‘Come and join the Army, it’s a lot of fun’. It’s really dangerous. It is basically about this is the world and how it really is.”

Doesn’t the comedy make the war more digestible for an audience?” Hoatson says: “The soldiers we spoke to seem to enjoy being soldiers so the series does show that but hopefully, with the drama element as well, it does show that it’s a bloody dangerous job and it’s not fun.”

Quinn agrees: “Some guys we spoke to enjoyed the drama and explosions. Some didn’t. They are all different.”

Is it the new M*A*S*H? Says Hoatson: “It’s good at switching between the comedy and drama and in that way it is similar to M*A*S*H.”